Author Archive | ShaolinTiger

I started Vlogging (yay) and here’s my first video an easy Paleo Mayonnaise recipe which is also Whole30 compliant and of course SUGAR FREE.

WildFit has changed me so much (totally changed our lives in fact) and I had a bit of a milestone today – I managed to buy a pair of Uniqlo jeans – which means I no longer have to wear ‘fat man’ clothes (which my wife calls choosing between ugly shirt A or ugly shirt B) and I can wear things I want to wear as I can fit in regular sizes on normal shops now – so I’m SUPER happy about that.

Anyway, I decided to try something else new as well, which is vlogging – many people asked about how to make Mayonnaise so that’s my first video, if you are interested in this kinda thing and more WildFit/Paleo/Whole30 compliant tips and recipes (nut butter, pickles, pancakes, deep fried oysters etc) tune in.

Here’s the video:

I’ll also be vlogging about other random other stuff as I’ll just be recording my life with my family and what I get up to (so expect to see some Liam too).

So please subscribe, share the videos if you find them useful and give me feedback!

Into WildFit Challenge week 7 we go (and week 8 really as they are pretty much the same). Honestly being in Spring gets easier and easier and week 7 is significantly better than week 6 (which is by FAR the hardest week of all) and then 8 is better than 7 and so on.

So yeah, things were going well – during week 7 I was down to about 119kg which is around 6kg down from the start of WildFit when I was 125kg.

Week 7

Spring is actually not too difficult, especially for us as we both enjoy cooking, we have the equipment, the tools and the skills to cook tasty food within the constraints of Spring.

The only really danger in Spring is boredom, I don’t really feel hungry, my energy is stabilised and I find eating much more salt helps (ketosis is diuretic and fat stores a lot of water and mineral content) so 3-5 grams a day is good (high quality pink Himalayan salt or unprocessed sea salt).

We had some amazing meals nevertheless.

Paleo Ikan Bakar (yes you can find chili boh and sambal with no sugar).

Served with cauliflower and broccoli rice of course (our go-to for Asian food).

Yah I was in a spicy, Asian food mood haha – one of my favourites – Petai Prawns!

We also found a great and completely compliant place to eat out – Chimichurri Jaya One. They have 2 really nice dressings without sugar and you can assemble your meal to be completely spring/paleo compliant.

More Asian food haha, this is something we have every week now seen as though we shop at NSK every Sunday night we grab a lovely fresh Siakap and steam it or oven bake it with ginger, garlic, chilis and some coconut aminos or Bragg’s aminos.

Week 8

We had another go at eating out at a place called Goodness Greens Cafe in TTDI, not even gonna talk about that as I had a bad experience and won’t be going back. Basically, a place that’s pretending to be healthy-ish – but really isn’t and has NO Dressings on the menu without some form of sugar (apart from plain olive oil, which I ended up having to have).

Bah Kuh Teh with konyaku noodles. If you have noodle cravings, these will be your saviour. In the US they sold as Miracle noodles or something like that, basically carb free, zero calorie noodles. 97% water and some undigestible fibre.

There’s no real secret to this phase, or staying in Spring other than to keep yourself fed well, make the effort to shop – learn to cook better and be creative.

Google whatever you want to eat + Paleo and then adapt it to fit in Spring.

Honestly don’t have a whole lot of meal pictures after this point as it stopped being a novelty and just started being how we eat every day, we don’t feel hungry, we have amazing energy, we sleep great and even when we don’t sleep that long we don’t feel tired all day.

Cravings are 99% gone (the odd devil conversation does pop-up now and then).

Pretty amazing really.

Buying some Ketostix – Ketone Measurement Sticks

This is also the stage when you want to know if you are entering Ketosis. So I bought some Ketostix aka Ketone sticks to test how I was doing, apparently, I was doing great (or not depending on how much you read..).

So yah, definitely in Ketosis, in optional nutritional ketosis? Probably not – but on the way for sure! It’s good to have a sign that we were doing the right thing. Now you have to understand Ketone urine reagent strips and that they measure what equates to excess ketones and also don’t measure the type of ketones you produce when you are fully keto or fat adapted.

Week 7 & 8 Summary

This is the time to buckle down, get into a rhythm and commit to doing this for as long as you need to. We surprisingly didn’t struggle too much, of course, cravings hit us hard sometimes – and we succumbed to some compliant as possible treats from time to time (almond coconut cookies and similar).

We ate a lot, made sure we had plenty of variety and still ate out at least once a week (our weekly Nando’s outing – a whole chicken with 4 portions of grilled vegetables, no carrots).

With the odd other meal at Paleolicious, ChimiChurri or sometimes we had to make do with whatever was available that was most supportive of our health (Subway salad is an option).

This is also a great time to start working out with a little more intention, which is why I started back up my Couch to 5k training.

And if you want to go a little deeper, here are some great books to read on the subject:

Read all of the above and you’ll be in an educated position to take complete control of your health. It’s a powerful position to be in.

If you are struggling to switch into ketosis, remember the following tips:

– Up your salt intake (my preference is Himalayan pink salt as it’s very mineral rich and pretty cheap and easily available here)
– Eat plenty of healthy fats (Coconut oil, fatty fish, avocados)
– Even more water than usual
– At minimum some moderate exercise (brisk walking for 20-30 minutes every day is enough, especially when you feel low energy)

This time though, I WILL FINISH IT! No promises I’ll actually be able to run 5 kilometres at the end, but I’ll give it a damn good go.

So yah, I started again. Started with walking at 3.2 mph and jogging at 5.2 mph – not too bad. Got a good sweat on and heart rate maxed out (my Fitbit Charge 2 arrived just in time!).

It’s a good work-out, nicely paced and with 3.2/5.2 mph I find it very manageable to complete. The first week has you going about 2.6km in 28 minutes.

I’ve actually complete 3 weeks of the program now and am starting my 4th (tomorrow night will be Week 4 – Day 1) and I haven’t missed a single session yet, plus I’ve completed them all.

My speed is up as well, now I’m doing 3.4 mph for the brisk walk and 5.4 mph for the jogging sections (the past week had 2x 3 minute jogs – which was pretty intense).

It’ll be interesting to see what the coming week brings, I can definitely feel the difference in my cardiovascular fitness, stamina and ability to run. It helps a lot of Badminton (which I try to play at least twice a week) – and burns insane calories (1500-2000 in a 2 hour session).

Week 6 is here, winter is over, fruits are gone and we are entering ketosis – also known in WildFit terms as ‘Spring’. I think the past 5 weeks have been leading up to this, week by week eliminating the most obvious bad stuff (sugars, dairy, grains, carbs) and the toxins which cause fat storage (alcohol, nicotine, caffeine) – all that’s left now which could make us gain weight is..

THE FRUIT – so yah, no more fruit platters for breakfast – fruit is OUT. No more apples in the Alkagizer, no more Alkagizer Mild. Now we switch to Alkagizer Prime which is basically a bitter green smoothie.

It’s not too bad at this point as our taste-buds have normalized a lot, so we can even detect sweetness in Lemon Juice now..

Day 1

Wow the first few days after cutting the fruit is TOUGH, your body is just screaming 24/7 for sugar, for carbs, for something to give it quick energy, you feel a crushing tiredness, headaches, body aches, cramps and I had pretty bad nausea too – this is called Keto Flu.

We continued having delicious meals, but Kimberly kept talking about Krispy Kreme donuts every 5 minutes, all day, and I kept having dreams of big piles of baguettes slathered in French rolled butter..

Day 3

By midweek we were feeling kinda better, slightly.. Energy was still hard to manage, especially if you exercised – aerobic exercise is recommend but not anaerobic which I did (Badminton). I feel asleep on the sofa immediately after getting back from badminton and woke up at 5am!

The Rest of the Week

Of course we continued having amazing meals, this was one by me – sous vide salmon with stir fried mixed vetables in a little Bragg’s Aminos.

We also realised we were shopping very differently and Malaysia does have healthier options available in all shops pretty much, you just need to look for them. Jaya Grocer has grass feed beef and a decent organic section where we could replace our normal Balsamic Vinegar with an organic option containing no sugar, caramel or colourings.

Selling my Nespresso Coffee Maker

I also got hardcore committed not not ingesting caffeine any more and decided to sell my Nespresso Pixie – it sold within an hour of me posting it.

Feels good to not have a daily drug addiction any more.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure caffeine will pass my lips on occasion in the form of chocolate – but it will be minimal and infrequent. Coffee and Tea is pretty much below my line of acceptability right now.

Making Nut Milk

Nut milk is REALLY expensive in Malaysia and usually has all sorts of crap in it, including sweeteners, chemicals and only about 2% nuts.

It’s really easy to make at home with some raw Macadamias bought from a baking supplies shop for about RM80-90 per kilo.

– Soak them for 2 hours with some good salt (pink himalayan or sea salt) and a splash of apple cider vinegar
– Blend them (1 cup of nuts with about 3 cups of water)
– Season to taste
– Drain with a nut bag (or we just used a cheese cloth)
– Chill and enjoy!

Honestly it’d be a lot nicer with a little sweetener (raw honey or maple syrup) but we can’t have those right now, and it’s pretty nice without.

Week 6 Summary

I’ve got to say, as far as this program goes, this is by far the toughest week so far – last week was pretty hard, but the fruit keeps your energy pretty high so you don’t suffer too much.

But as soon as you cut the fruit out, bam, your energy sinks to the bottom of the ocean and you feel all over the place as the last remnants of sugar leave your body.

It’s one time when you have to exercise some willpower, read about what is going on with your body and power through it until you flip your switch from sugar burning to fat burning (ketosis or entering a ketogenic state).

– So up your salt intake (my preference is Himalayan pink salt as it’s very mineral rich and pretty cheap and easily available here)
– Eat plenty of healthy fats (Coconut oil, fatty fish, avocados)
– Even more water than usual
– Some moderate exercise (brisk walking for 20-30 minutes every day is enough, especially when you feel low energy)

Recently I was invited down to Penang for DevFest + GDay George Town 2016 to give a talk on Web Application Security. This is my 3rd year in a row attending (for a panel and last year a talk) and this year I managed to record (most of) my talk with my own camera.

The subject I covered was titled “An introduction to Web Application Security” mainly focused for web application developers (although most principles also apply to mobile and native or embedded apps). The talk covers the basic principles of infosec (CIA), do’s and don’t and the top 5 from the OWASP Top 10.

I thought what was the highest value subject that I have some decent expertise in and is relevant to the audience (mostly young or junior web and mobile devs), last year I already covered CI/CD and the tools used + some agile.

So this year I decided to go back to my roots and dive into security in a fairly holistic manner (without getting too technical).

This week was a shocker for a lot of people, WHAT NO CAFFEINE TO WAKE UP?! WHAT NO ALCOHOL TO FALL ASLEEP?! NO NICOTINE?! Indeed, no alcohol or caffeine and no nicotine.

Yah, those are the crutches most people are extremely reliant on, and the basis is that now you’re extremely well nutritionally satisfied at this stage (After having Alkagizers and fruits for 3 weeks now, any withdrawal symptoms you might have will be minimised drastically).

I already stopped caffeine earlier when we stopped dairy because honestly coffee doesn’t taste that great, especially without cream or milk – it’s just kinda bitter and very acidic. But alcohol haha, slightly harder for me as I love beer and whisky and enjoy them on a fairly regular basis.

I have stopped alcohol totally for 30 days before just to make sure I was an alcoholic (Which my family has history of) and I could do it just fine, so I know a few weeks in this case is no problem.

Caffeine was a real problem for some people, especially those with a 4-5 cups a day habit, they had terrible withdrawals (sweating, trouble sleeping, back aches, intense tiredness, shaking and more).

The Kitchen Clean-out

No real changes for us, but this week we got REALLY committed to this, I wanted to throw away some jam and a few things from the fridge and we ended up cleaning out the entire fridge, freezer and all our cupboards.

We were brutal, anything with ANY form of sugar, dairy or wheat is gone. Cupboard, fridge and freezer now only contain foods that support us.

I’ll be honest, it was hard, but not as hard as I thought, I have a strong emotional/cultural attachment to some things, which I don’t even really eat (which is odd) but feel much better now I don’t have to hang onto them any more.

For Kim it was her beloved jelly. For most I’m sure we can find more functional alternatives. I was surprised neither of us was really attached to the ice cream.

Ended up with about 6 bin bags full of crap.

Started slow with condiments, yup they all have sugar in.

The first huge pile of stuff.

More crap.

Another thing we observed was that we had bought a lot of this stuff, but 90% of it was unopened and expired which means we thought we wanted it, but actually we didn’t and never ended up consuming it.

Which kinda shows we were already on the right track, just not consciously, not all the way and not fully committed.

Day 1

By now honestly I didn’t real feel the need to eat lunch, the fruits and Alkagizer were very filling and kept me full till about 3-4pm when we just needed something light to keep us going to dinner (an avocado) and one of our favourites, and the reason I made mayonaise is two 6-minute boiled eggs with some sea salt, mayo and paprika.

And of course we kept on with our carb free meals for now to flip our switch to fat burning as we move into week 6 and a new season.

Day 4

We managed to eat out and stay on plan, no pictures of the food as we were too hungry haha. We went to Nando’s after taking Liam for his play-time at Ikano.

He also had a fairly WildFit compliant diet but we got him some fries as he does need more carbs than us to keep growing. We weren’t even tempted to eat any of the fries, which was pretty amazing.

Week 5 Summary

So the week wasn’t too bad and for Kim was easy as she doesn’t have to change anything really (She doesn’t drink coffee, alcohol or smoke so ya) but we did cut out all processed foods just to follow the program as strictly as possible.

That means everything you can buy in a can, jar or vacuum pack is out for now to give our body a break from all the chemicals and preservatives in those types of food.

Everything we are eating is natural and fresh.

Honestly wasn’t too hard for me either, as I have a massive beer tasting coming up on 29th (gonna be TOTALLY off program) so I can stop for a while, and probably will enjoy stopping after that too haha.

Doctor Ringgit is an online licensed money lender in Malaysia focusing on small loans, a simple stress free process and a quick 24-hour turn around.

Loans are available from RM500-5000 (capped at RM2000 for first time borrowers) with a maximum of 18% (around the same as most credit cards charge annual interest rate).

Sometimes you just need that little extra cash, you need it fast and you can pay it back once you get your salary. The initial term for the loans are at a maximum of 30 days, but if one cannot afford to pay it back when due, they can opt for an extension of the loan for another 30 days by paying the minimum payment. Much like credit cards, if by only paying the minimum amount required, one can finish paying off the loan by the 12th month.

The application is super straight forwards.

Doctor Ringgit promises to be:

Rapid – A few minutes to apply using their hassle free application process, upon approval money is disbursed within 24 hours (for business days)

Wow, this is when it gets real serious for most people NO CARBS – what? No Rice? No Potatoes? No BREAD?! Yup, no grains, no wheat, no white potatoes – wow. And to top that off, NO DAIRY in the same week.

Bloody hell, flashes of latte, cheese and biscuits, bread, cheese on toast, lasagne, pasta, pizza, chips, crisps and everything else most of our life revolves around (which is totally wrong and terrible unhealthy) but quite a shock for most people.

I’ve already cut my carbs way down since June (I always give half to Liam), haven’t really changed dairy intake (it’s not that large anyway, 1 small latte a day and cheese now and then) but we still eat bread fairly regularly (bread with sugar in no less, as all bread has).

You probably already know a fair amount about white carbs and why they are not good for us, but a lot of people are surprised by dairy as it’s always been touted as a super-food and good for you but it’s really not. If you want to learn more about dairy, and why it’s not supportive of our health you can read this:

Day 1-3

Unfortunately I was in Thailand for the first 3 days of week 4, so it was really hard – we did have fruit first thing in the morning still, ate our avocados and made as best choice as we could.

Thai food fortunately on the whole is reasonably healthy, smallish portions, plenty of veges and seafood but I’m pretty sure they all have sugar in and I still did eat a small amount of carbs.

But as soon as we got back to KL (which was around Midnight on Wednesday) we went straight to NSK (after an 8 hour drive all the way from Hat Yai) to get our fruits and Alkagizer ingredients to get back on track.

I was actually missing all the fruits, veges and green stuff after a few days away from it.

The rest of the week

We’ve definitely had some delicious meals since then even with no carbs, this is cauliflower and carrot rice with steamed broccoli and balsamic vinegar chicken drumsticks.

At this point, we’ve got pretty much completely paleo – and right at the extreme end of the spectrum.

Of course we’re also keeping up our daily fruits and smoothies regime, even before a beer tasting 😀

I kept pretty on program at lunch too, order whatever has the most vegetables and replace any potatoes/pasta/bread with another portion of vegetables – I had chicken parmagiana and swapped the potatoes for extra veges. It was slightly off program because of the bread-crumbs and a little cheese – but way better than any of the other pasta or pizza options.

The Vitamix 5200

I caved in week 3 as well and ordered a Vitamix 5200 from Amazon UK, that arrived the day after we got back too, so finally our chunkies really became smoothies!

It’s such a breeze to use, so easy to clean, no stupid latching safely mechanism and SO powerful. It’s that fast, you can actually hot soup in the machine just by blending something for 4-5 minutes. Amazing.

Healthy Ingredients in Malaysia

I’ve also become a lot more aware of healthy ingredients in the shops in KL, some of them have a fantastic range – so far I was super impressed by village Grocer in 1 Mont Kiara which has LOADS of stuff.

I picked up some Bragg’s Aminos (a soya sauce alternative with no sugar and no wheat) from there along with some Avocados and Rooibos tea (for the upcoming week).

I’ve also noticed most shops sell these kind of things, Aminos, tamari (wheat and sugar free soya sauce), various types of flour, organic balsamic with no colouring or sugar etc. There’s lots of healthy choices around us, we just don’t really look at them.

And honestly, they do cost more. But would you rather pay a little more for ingredients now, or the doctors bills later? easy choice for me.

Healthy Paleo Brownies

We also went a little into a grey area over the weekend, as we knew what was coming up after the buffer zone and made some border-line on program paleo brownies using coconut flour, coconut oil instead of butter, maple syrup and cocoa powder.

They were delicious with a cup of Rooibos tea!

Week 4 Summary

So yah, it’s getting pretty tough now, but honestly the no carbs thing is not that tough – there’s nothing that I super miss or crave for and I feel I’m sleeping better, my energy is very even (no midday crashes) I can concentrate better and I’m already losing weight (not much yet, but it’s starting) even though we aren’t in the real weight loss period yet.

The smoothies are even better now with the Vitamix and I’m actually starting to find them a little sweet with the apples in, especially if I use Banana when our avocados aren’t ripe yet.

So I think my taste buds are normalising and my stomach is shrinking (I get full with less faster) – which is great. Plus I don’t have cravings for sugary things, and when you feel this stable energy wise – you don’t even want to eat those things subconsciously.

So it turns out to delete a Facebook group it must have no admins, and no members, which seems kinda silly. So I found this JavaScript to Mass Remove Facebook Group Members and tweaked it a bit so it worked, it takes multiple runs to go through a large group – but in the end it got the job done and I could delete the group.

Offical from Facebook:

If you’ve created a group, you can delete the group by removing all its members and then yourself. To delete a group: Go to the group you want to delete and click Members below the cover photo. Click next to each member’s name and select Remove from Group.

The below code can help you with that, make sure you edit the excludedFbIds and enter your own Facebook ID so it doesn’t delete you first. You can find it here: http://findmyfbid.com/

It works fine in Firefox, so edit it, then paste in the JavaScript console and run it. It might have errors sometimes and hang or pause, just reload the page and execute it again. I did a fairly big group with a few thousand members and it cleaned them all out eventually.

Now it starts to get real, and real hard haha – the first real thing to remove from our diets is the worst of course – which is going all out no sugar.

Fortunately for me, I’ve been cutting most of the sugar out of my diet since June when I came back from Europe with a little too much extra love around the middle, so I don’t have a huge sugar dependence.

The problem mainly in Asia is eating out, EVERYTHING has sugar in it (soya sauce, oyster sauce, rice wine etc) so eating in restaurants is mostly impossible. Also check the ingredients on everything you buy, you’d be shocked at how many things have sugar in them.

One person checked the ingredients for their salt, yah salt, low sodium salt to be precise – and guess what? Yah, it has sugar in it – so be vigilant, the food industry is hiding sugar everywhere because it’s addictive, cheap and every time you eat sugar it makes you want to eat more sugar.

Day 1

The start of the week wasn’t too hard actually, we just had to be a little more vigilant especially with the seasoning we used – and we got this for snacking on (from Tesco).

No sugar at all! Also with eating all the fruits and the Alkagizer religiously, you actually have much less cravings for sweet stuff than you did before – and unhealthy stuff as well in general.

I actually also stopped coffee (and most dairy) this week, because after the fruits and Alkagizer I didn’t feel any need for caffeine. And other than coffee I don’t eat all that much dairy anyway.

Day 5

It got a little harder towards the end of the week as I was travelling to Penang to give a talk at a Google event, yah PENANG FOOD! So honestly I stretched the rules a little as I knew the food I was eating had Soya sauce etc (minimal amounts of sugar), but I made good choices wherever I could (ordered warm water with lemon instead of sugary drinks etc) and didn’t over-eat (which is REALLY hard in Penang).

Plus I even found a Paleo friendly place Awesome Canteen where I went for lunch and had a smoothie (we brought our own Avocado along too like weird nerds and ate that too haha).

I had a delicious eggplant burger with sweet potato fries.

So yah, plus eating fruit still first thing in the morning.

And then on Sunday it was off to Thailand, thankfully fruit is in abundance there and we were still in the buffer zone until Monday anyway. And we still had some Avocados fortunately haha, so we had half each of one of those each morning for our good fats.

Honestly by the end of the weekend I was missing good food with lots of veges and my Alkagizer!

So yah, no sugar wasn’t too tough – there are harder ones coming I know it..and again Friday was an enhancement day with the weekend as the buffer zone – which we took advantage of haha.

Weeky 3 Summary

So this weeks enhancement wasn’t too bad for us, it would be bad if you have a very sugary diet and eat a lot of junk with ingredients you can’t pronounce (Sugar has around 60 names commonly listed in ingredients – make sure you avoid them ALL).

If you were already using natural sugars (honey, pure maple syrup) you can continue during this week, but you can’t substitute refined sugar for natural sugar.

Natural sugars as ingredients in anything are also OUT.

– Drink more water (at least 6-8 large glasses a day)
– Eat 3 pieces of fruit each morning on an empty stomach
– Drink the Alkagizer Mild
– Then eat lunch as normal
– Add an EXTRA portion of vegetables at every meal
– Remove ALL refined sugar from your diet